Why Your On-Page Hurts SEO

Having your on-page SEO in line is always the first step of any SEO campaign. Quite simply, if your on-page optimization is lacking something then even the best link building campaign won’t be able to give you 100% of its potential.

Here are some of the problems that your site might be experiencing:

Inconsistent URL Structure

URLs are important. Actually, they are among the most important on-page factors. Well-designed URLs should be short, to-the-point and keyword-optimized.

For example, good URL: yoursite.com/free-poker-chips

Bad URL: yoursite.com/index.php?page=2&source=123HDG7

What’s also important is to keep URLs consistent throughout the site. WordPress allows you to set this in the Settings > Permalinks section in the WP Admin.

Too Much Flash

Google has a harder time crawling Flash elements than crawling standard text and images. Focus on improving accessibility rather than adding bells and whistles to your site design.

No Canonical URLs

The pages on your WordPress site can very well have more than one URL assigned to them. This is due to various session handles, plugin data and other factors. To fix this, you should set the canonical link attribute for every page. The easiest way of handling this is getting the WordPress SEO plugin, which will include the canonical links automatically.

Unoptimized Titles And Descriptions

Although we all know the importance of quality page titles and descriptions, it’s very VERY easy to overlook them during our everyday work. Whenever you’re writing a new post or creating a new affiliate page, make sure to use your main keyword in the title as well as in the description.

Poor Load Times

Your load time is actually among one of the most essential on-page optimization factors these days. To learn more, please check our other (in-depth) post – how to increase website speed.

Content Quantity

Yes, that’s quantity, not quality. Everyone knows that quality is important, but the number of good articles you have matters too. It’s a lot more difficult to rank an affiliate site consisting of just three pages than one with 20 of them.

Duplicate Content

This is an old problem but it’s still relevant today. Quite frankly, Google has gotten a lot smarter over the years and it’s now believed that they can recognize spun content. This simply means that spun = duplicate. In order to rank, you need 100% original content.

Too Many Keywords

Mentioning the keywords you want to rank for is a must for on-page optimization. However, mentioning them too often is the fast-track way to kill your rankings.